CFSES External Advisory Board

A dedicated researcher in applications of nanomaterials and mesoscale science, Dr. Bryant’s research interests range from grain-scale models of geologic processes to the role of methane hydrates in Earth’s carbon cycle. In addition to pioneering the fields of digital petrophysics and nanoparticles for petroleum engineering applications, he has made some of the most significant advances in the past 20 years in porous media modeling, reactive transport theory and CO2 sequestration. Dr. Bryant has been published more than 290 times including books, book chapters, peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings on applications in production engineering, reservoir engineering, and formation evaluation. He received his PhD in chemical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, and his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Before accepting his position, Dr. Bryant was Bank of America Centennial Professor in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, and director of two industrial affiliates programs, one on Nanoparticles for Subsurface Engineering and another on Geological CO2 Storage at The University of Texas at Austin. He previously held both the J.H. Herring Centennial Professorship and the George H. Fancher Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Petroleum Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, and served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

Michael is currently the Executive Director and Business Manager of Greenway Technical Consulting Services, Inc. In this role he is a consultant focusing on oil and gas and carbon storage with expertise in Strategic Planning, Technology, and Innovation.

Michael recently retired from Schlumberger where he managed Schlumberger Carbon Services located in Houston, Texas, U.S.A., leading a diverse business team composed of finance, marketing, project managers and petrotechnical experts in geology, geophysics, petrophysics, drilling, and reservoir and production engineering to bring Schlumberger’s vast experience and technology in oilfield services and operations to the Carbon Storage business. In this role, he managed numerous CO2 storage projects in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia assuring technical quality, safe operations, and developing innovative solutions for the safe storage and monitoring of CO2 in deep saline reservoirs.

Prior to joining the Carbon Services group, he served within Schlumberger as the Production Technology Advisor for the Houston Technology Centre. Other roles have included management and technical oversite for technology development projects specializing in Production and Reservoir Optimization and Permanent Downhole Sensing. A significant portion of the work over the past two decades has been focused on innovation and optimization.

Over his career with Schlumberger which began in 1991, he has held positions in both technical and managerial roles with responsibilities covering countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, and Australia. In addition to his regular responsibilities, he has been dedicated to mentoring and has served for several years in leadership roles in the Production and Completions Engineering and Sensor Technology technical communities within Schlumberger as well as the management sponsor for other technical communities.

Before joining Schlumberger, he worked as a Development Geologist for Gulf Oil and Chevron for almost 15 years in West Texas, West Africa, and the North Sea where he specialized in well remediation, field development planning, and equity redetermination. He holds a BSc in Geological Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.

In 2014, Mr. Christopher retired as President of Ultimate EOR, which uses proprietary technology created at UT to design chemical EOR systems for use in petroleum reservoirs worldwide. The company was built from the concept stage in 18 months and at the end of 2014, had investment, facilities, employees, and contracts for business.

Mr. Christopher has over 40 years industry experience in all phases of enhanced oil recovery and is considered an international expert in the area. He served as a business development consultant for BP and Battelle Memorial Institute, and was also involved in the capture and geological storage of CO2 to prevent its effects as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

Prior to the work in CO2 capture and storage, Mr. Christopher was Global Technology Project Manager for Gas Injection EOR at BP. BEfore moving to BP, he headed the Amoco Thermal Recovery group in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was a member of their Environmental Research Group.

DePaolo began his term in Berkeley in 1988 as a UC Berkeley Professor of Geochemistry in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, with a joint appointment in the Earth Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab. DePaolo established and directs the Center for Isotope Geochemistry, a joint research facility between Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. DePaolo is also the Class of 1951 Professor of Geochemistry in UC Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science.

DePaolo was officially announced as the Earth Sciences Division Director in 2007. Prior to this appointment, DePaolo held the Geochemistry Department Head role in the Earth Sciences Division. In Spring of 2009, DePaolo became the Director of the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2 (EFRC). DePaolo was appointed Associate Laboratory Director of Energy and Environmental Sciences April 1, 2011.

Derek Elsworth is a professor in the Departments of Energy and Mineral Engineering and of Geosciences and the Center for Geomechanics, Geofluids, and Geohazards. His interests are in the areas of computational mechanics, rock mechanics, and in the mechanical and transport characteristics of fractured rocks, with application to geothermal energy, the deep geological sequestration of radioactive wastes and of CO2, unconventional hydrocarbons including coal-gas, tight-gas-shales and hydrates, and instability and eruption dynamics of volcanoes.

Since 2003, Dr. Scott M. Frailey has been a senior reservoir engineer for the Illinois State Geologic Survey, where he is involved with the technical aspects of the CO2 storage and CO2 EOR programs and provides technical expertise in the areas of reservoir characterization and engineering including pressure transient analyses, core analyses, well log analyses, and reservoir modeling. Previously, Scott was an associate professor of petroleum engineering at Texas Tech University (TTU) where he taught and conducted research in the areas of formation evaluation, reservoir engineering and CO2 EOR. Prior to joining TTU in 1992, Scott held full time employment and internships with BP Exploration (Alaska), Arco Oil and Gas, and Marathon Oil.

Dr. Frailey graduated from the University of Missouri-Rolla with B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in petroleum engineering in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. He is a registered professional engineer in Texas, New Mexico, and Illinois.

Kurt has spent over a decade as an entrepreneur and academic working on the physics, chemistry, and economics of various forms of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Kurt founded C12 Energy to develop CO2-EOR projects with industrial CO2, and he raised $230 million of equity to finance C12 from Reservoir Capital, WAFRA, and Sequoia Capital. Over several years, Kurt led C12 as it grew from 2 to 50 people and acquired 3 oil fields containing over 50 million barrels of tertiary reserves. Currently, Kurt serves on the board of C12 Energy, and he is an Executive in Residence at Perry Creek Capital—where he is working build Phase Change Resources.

Kurt has researched a variety of technical approaches to managing industrial CO2, including ways to accelerate the Earth’s chemical weathering cycle and storing industrial CO2 in ocean sediments. He has also studied the energetics of removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere. He wrote a regular column on energy issues for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; he testified to congress regarding the technical feasibility of carbon sequestration; and in 2009 he was named one of 35 under 35 by MIT Technology Review.

Kurt researched miscible gas flooding as a King Abdullah University of Science & Technology Fellow at MIT, and he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University for related work. His peer reviewed publications have been cited over 460 times. Previously, Kurt did private equity and corporate advising with Bain & Company. He holds degrees in Physics and Geoscience.

Jean E. Roberts received a B.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Houston. She received a Habilitation in applied mathematics from the University of Paris IX (Dauphine). Since 1982 she has worked at the Paris-Rocquencourt research center of Inria (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) where she was Directeur de Recherche until 2013 and is now Chargé de Mission.

Her research contri-butions have been in numerical analysis of numerical methods for partial dierential equations, mathematical and numerical modeling for wave propagation phenomena, and mathematical and numerical modeling of ow and transport in porous media. More particularly this has concerned formulation and analysis of nite element methods, mixed nite element methods and nite volumemethods, domain decomposition methods, absorbing boundary conditions for acoustic and elasto-dynamic equations. Her current research concerns modeling ow and transport in fractured porous media, space-time domain decomposition methods and hexahedral mixed nite element methods.

CFSES News

Congratulations to CISR team members who are part of the Gulf Coast Carbon Center at the Bureau of Economic Geology. The group collectively won the 2016 Jackson School of Geosciences Outstanding Research Award at The University of Texas at Austin this December. CISR researchers who are members of the Gulf Coast Carbon Center include Tip Meckel, Sue Hovorka, Changbing Yang, and Luca Trevisan (post-doc). Congratulations to this group for their well-deserved recognition.

In December 2015, Marc Hesse was presented with the Jackson School of Geosciences Outstanding Research Award, which recognizes research accomplishments by an individual or a team of faculty or scientists. Congratulations, Marc!